The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust

Older people falling from a standing height is the most common cause of hospital admission for head injury. Up to 1 in 3 patients admitted are taking a tablet medication which thins the blood, known as an oral anticoagulant. This type of medication can increase the likelihood of bleeding in the brain. Many patients are taking oral anticoagulation due to having an irregular heartbeat (called atrial fibrillation) or because of having a previous stroke or blood clots. When a scan shows blood in the brain, oral anticoagulation is nearly always stopped. However, this leaves the question of when it is safe to restart them. The risk of making the bleeding in the brain worse must be balanced against the risk of having a stroke or blood clots. There is no clear evidence on the safest time to restart oral anticoagulation, but most neurosurgeons advise restarting them 1-4 weeks after head injury. The number of people who have a bleed on their brain after a head injury is increasing and further brain bleeding or a stroke can have a serious effect on patients' lives and their on-going healthcare needs. Public and patient groups have highlighted that many patients want to stop taking oral anticoagulation after a bleed but they may be unaware of the vital importance of restarting this medication to prevent strokes and blood clots. The most popular oral anticoagulation prescribed has changed in recent years from warfarin to newer medications called Direct Oral Anti-Coagulants (DOACs).
This trial will recruit 1084 people who are admitted to hospital with a bleed on the brain caused by a head injury who were taking oral anticoagulation before their head injury and have been prescribed a Direct Oral Anti-Coagulant (DOAC) for previously diagnosed medical condition. Patients on other Oral Anti-Coagulants, such as Warfarin may also be able to take part. The main purpose of the trial is to determine when is most beneficial time for people to start or restart a DOAC after their head injury. People will be asked to start the medication either 1 week or 4 weeks after their head injury. They will be then followed closely for 12 weeks and any major bleeding events or a blood clots (thrombotic events) such as a stroke or heart attack will be recorded. The study will also look at the person's overall quality of life, how they recover physically, the number of people who die, the costs of the treatment, and the attitudes of people and their caregivers to starting or restarting a DOAC.

Exercise videos on the internet are used by millions worldwide to provide structure and motivation. They can guide exercise execution and play a role in helping people to maintain regular exercise.
On completion of the Pain Management Programme (PMP) at the Walton Centre, many patients are measurably more able bodied as a result (or at least part of a result) of regular engagement in exercise. Despite these positive outcomes and the patients stated intent to continue with exercise, many patients are struggling to maintain exercise in a meaningful way when re-assessed at their six month follow up appointment.
Patients have expressed that videos of the exercises would have motivated them to engage in sustained regular exercise in a more meaningful manner.
As physiotherapists, the investigators would like to ask a sample of patients on the PMP whether they anticipate exercise videos, reflecting the exercises practised on the PMP, would be beneficial for them to support maintenance/ sustainability of PMP exercises. Exercises practiced on the PMP include stretches, repeated movements in sitting, standing and lying, Pilates, yoga, normalised/functional movements and patients may like these exercises included in the videos.
The investigators plan to approach this using two focus groups followed by a qualitative analysis of recorded transcripts of the group discussions. Data would be analysed using a thematic analysis to establish key themes related to the research questions. The information gathered will inform the value of and content / format of specifically developed exercise videos.
The outcome of this project will inform the investigators of the use of exercise videos in this patient population and the value of this in encouraging people to keep up exercise over a sustained period. Other centres working with patients with chronic pain may be able to learn valuable lessons from this project in informing their own exercise promotion materials for their patients.

STUDY OVERVIEW Brain injury can result in a loss of consciousness or awareness, to varying degrees. Some injuries are mild and cause relatively minor changes in consciousness. However, in severe cases a person can be left in a state where they are "awake" but unaware, which is called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS, previously known as a vegetative state). Up to 43% of patients with a UWS diagnosis, regain some conscious awareness, and are then reclassified as minimally conscious after further assessment by clinical experts. Many of those in the minimally conscious state (MCS) and all with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) are incapable of providing any, or consistent, overt motor responses and therefore, in some cases, existing measures of consciousness are not able to provide an accurate assessment. Furthermore, patients with locked-in syndrome (LIS), which is not a disorder of consciousness as patients are wholly aware, also, struggle to produce overt motor responses due to paralysis and anarthria, leading to long delays in accurate diagnoses using current measures to determine levels of consciousness and awareness. There is evidence that LIS patients, and a subset of patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness (DoC), can imagine movement (such as imagining lifting a heavy weight with their right arm) when given instructions presented either auditorily or visually - and the pattern of brain activity that they produce when imagining these movements, can be recorded using a method known as electroencephalography (or EEG). With these findings, the investigators have gathered evidence that EEG-based bedside detection of conscious awareness is possible using Brain- Computer Interface (BCI) technology - whereby a computer programme translates information from the users EEG-recorded patterns of activity, to computer commands that allow the user to interact via a user interface. The BCI system for the current study employs three possible imagined movement combinations for a two-class movement classification; left- vs right-arm, right-arm vs feet, and left-arm vs feet. Participants are trained, using real-time feedback on their performance, to use one of these combinations of imagined movement to respond to 'yes' or 'no' answer questions in the Q&A sessions, by imagining one movement for 'yes' and the other for 'no'. A single combination of movements is chosen for each participant at the outset, and this participant-specific combination is used throughout their sessions. The study comprises three phases. The assessment Phase I (sessions 1-2) is to determine if the patient can imagine movements and produce detectable modulation in sensorimotor rhythms and thus is responding to instructions. Phase II (sessions 3-6) involves motor-imagery (MI) -BCI training with neurofeedback to facilitate learning of brain activity modulation; Phase III (sessions 7-10) assesses patients' MI-BCI response to closed questions, categorized to assess biographical, numerical, logical, and situational awareness. The present study augments the evidence of the efficacy for EEG-based BCI technology as an objective movement-independent diagnostic tool for the assessment of, and distinction between, PDoC and LIS patients.